I would be really curious as to what would constitute "scrutiny of neighborhood group citizen participation". Would the neighborhood group be required to ask each participant to fill out a form describing the participant's demographic which would be compared to the "official census". I am pretty sure that this would not work since most participants at community meetings are somewhat uneasy with providing their names. In my book citizen participation has to be judged on notification and access not on results. If the group widely publicizes an event and make it easy for community members to get to and into the meeting the group has fulfilled the citizen participation requirement. Making people show up is not a good idea.
IMHO if a community group really wants to solve community problems citizen participation is critical. First, citizens are generally really smart and probably know how to define and fix the problem better than anyone else. (Ability to understand community problems falls off at approximately the 3 or 4th power of the number of jurisdictions removed.) Second, it only takes a couple of individuals to kill a plan if they are riled up enough, so one should cast as wide a net as possible to get agreement from as many people as possible to lower the odds of the plan being terminated. Third, people who feel that an organization listens to them are much more likely to work with the organization and in this political environment community groups need all the help they can get. Cheers; > Michael Atherton wrote: > However, state statues require citizen participation in > the NRP. Yielding scrutiny to the MCDA mean that > there is no scrutiny because the MCDA denies that > they are responsible for the NRP. Yielding scrutiny > to neighborhood groups also means there is no > scrutiny because these groups cannot be expected > to report or correct their own abuses. Which means that > ultimately there is no effective oversight of the NRP. > Hopefully the budget crisis will solve this problem > because the NRP shows no interest in reforming > itself. -- DeWayne Townsend Cooper [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
